Jamaican Artist Tommy Lee Center Of U.S. Lottery Scam

Jamaica is known for its gorgeous landscapes, delicious cuisine,  beautiful people and brilliant minds. Jamaica is also known for – violence, skin-bleaching and scamming!

In today’s scamming news, dancehall artist Tommy Lee Sparta (born Leroy Russell) is the center of a lottery scamming trial in Kingston’s Supreme Court, that began this week.

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Russell, O’Brian Smith and two other suspects, were originally arrested in February 2014, when items were seized during a police raid of a Kingston apartment. The two suspects were released, while Russell and Smith were charged on suspicion of breaches of Jamaica’s Law Reform (Fraudulent Transaction) (Special Provisions) Act, 2013.

According to Jamaica Gleaner‘s reporting on the trial:

Detective Corporal Campbell told prosecuting attorney Sophia Thomas that he examined evidence received from investigators, which included a laptop and a one terabyte external hard drive that contained the information on the foreign nationals.
The hard drive and laptop were tendered into evidence as exhibits nine and 10, respectively.
“I found a partition on the hard drive called ‘Tommy Lee’. I observed two files in the trash folder. I viewed the contents and observed they contained names, addresses, city, state, zip, and phone numbers. It was North American numbers, based on the area code,” he said.
Campbell told the court that both files contained 1,001 records each for persons living in California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Orlando. The court also heard that the police found more than 5,500 records of personal information for people living abroad on the same computer.

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Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Sparta’s attorney, Ernest Smith believes the entertainer and his co-accused will be exonerated. According to our friends over at YardFlex, “the attorney expressed confidence that a no-case submission, if entered, would be upheld.”

Under cross-examination, Williams admitted that a former police officer, Lionel Hamilton, had access to all the evidential material he handed over to the cybercrime unit. Williams also said that he has not seen the evidence since 2014.

Lottery scamming is one of the trending crimes in the Caribbean country.

“Lotto scamming is, in many ways, just a 21st-century rendition of the criminal violence that has plagued Jamaica for decades.” states an article on TheConversation.com.